Dance Trance, Circus Capitals and the Escape of Death

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The paradigms of trance, rapture, and ecstasy have a history of being invoked to analyze collective dancing manias, religious mysticism, and messianic movements, improvised music practices, texts authored by spirit mediums, as well tendencies in ethnographic filmmaking involving spirit possession. This panel explores different “interruptions” of consciousness and their related sociabilities in light of this history in an effort to understand how the pathologization of these and related activities offer opportunities for the recovery of counternarratives that point to alternative models of consciousness, subjectivity, and sociability. The panel relates these questions to ongoing discussions involving critiques of populism as well as hauntology, the political economy of specters and zombies, and the ambivalent valences of play.

Sub Track

• Performance and Visual Studies

Individual Presentations

• How to Make a Kizombie: Entrainment, Affect and the Body Subjected to Latin Dance Trance - Sybil Cooksey

• The Stagecraft of Death: National Patrimony and Magic in the Port-au-Prince Cemetery - Katherine M Smith

• Circus Capitals: From the American Circus to the Circus in The Americas - Roy Gomez Cruz